So, my last post was in February, and there is a very good reason for that. That was the month I got my IRB approval for my dissertation research and the same month my husband left for a nine-month tour in Korea. So, here I’ve been working full-time, being a full-time mom and working on my dissertation.

The working title for my information science dissertation so far is Understanding Parental Information Behavior in Assessing Video Game Content for their Children: An Ethnographic Study. I’ll be using ethnographic methods similar to the ones I used for my Masters thesis including both in-person and virtual semi-structured interviews with parents, an online survey, and observing parents shopping for video games. You can learn more about it at ResearchingVideoGames.

I’m currently analyzing my interviews and will be seeking approval IRB approval for my survey as the fall semester begins. If you are a parent of a child who plays video games and is between the ages of 4 and 17, feel free to email me at researchingvideogames [@] gmail in order to be notified when the survey becomes available. As a parent, you don’t have to be a gamer to participate.

During this next part of my research process I will be posting a survey available to all Fedora contributors. Luckily, this part of the participation process requires no signatures! So, those of you who were unable to participate in the interview process* will be able to easily participate in the survey portion as it is completely electronic.

The long and short of surveys is the quantitative statistical analysis that can be performed on them. The purpose of my survey is to help triangulate the data obtained during the qualitative (interview/participant observation) portion of my research against a broader sample that is more representative of the overall community. However, in order to do this properly I need to know how big the current overall community is.

This is where I need your help. I need you, Fedora Project contributors, to help me find ways to get at least an approximate count of currently active and contributing participants that can be verified by some means. This could be getting the number for how many people own packages in Rawhide or even how many people have edited the wiki in the past 6 months. Being that not everyone owns packages or edits the Wiki, we need ways to count the other contributors as well. Also, there is likely some overlap between several countable contributing groups so we need to keep issues like that under consideration. I understand that it will be difficult to come up with an exact number, so a close approximation will suffice as long as we have ways to support how we got the numbers and they are verifiable.

Not only will we need to ways to get the numbers, but also the people who are able to access that data and get it to me. So, if you come up with an idea but have no knowledge of how to actually get the data in question, feel free to brainstorm on this post with other people! I imagine that by working together we can quickly and easily come up with ways to figure this out. I’ll be hanging out in IRC as always, so feel free to ping me there or email me if you have ideas, questions, or numbers you wish to donate to the cause.

Once we have a number, then I can come up with a quota and will be able to release the survey!

I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for helping me out with this process. 🙂

*If you still want to participate in the interview process and have the ability to return your signature to me electronically (print/scan, fax, xournal, signing with a mouse) then please contact me diana [@] cyber-anthro.com.

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#Research this week reinforced this. Everyone has a hack. Embrace the hacks and figure out how to incorporate them into your product. #ux5 days ago